Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-24-Speech-4-147"
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"en.20050224.13.4-147"2
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"Mr President, in January 1990 Nepal celebrated the Year of Tourism. A magnificent parade involving tens of thousands of participants and several hundred thousand spectators demonstrated the full extent of the cultural wealth of the country, with its sherpas, monks, temple dancers, sadhus, mahouts, mandala artists and mountaineers.
I took part in this parade with the organisation Friends of Nepal. We marched through Kathmandu and past King Birendra, who enjoyed the highest respect of 95-98% of the Nepalese people, both as a person and as a champion of the constitutional monarchy. This makes the contrast with King Gyanendra, seven years later, appear all the starker. He has dismissed yet another prime minister, and dozens of politicians, human rights activists and journalists have been taken into custody or placed under house arrest. He now intends to rule as an autocrat for three years.
The question that needs to be asked is why not one prime minister in recent years has managed to hold free elections, and the answer is that agreement has never been reached between the various parties, not to mention with the Maoists. The main reason, however, is the lack of security in the country. People are living in fear, and by no means only in western Nepal. Two thirds of the country is now under the control of Maoist rebels, and inadequately-trained police officers fall victim time and time again to lethal attacks. The civil war has claimed 10 000 lives so far and shows no sign of coming to an end, with tourism, the country's main source of income, having been brought almost to a standstill.
I am afraid that the Maoists will gain further supporters following the coup of 1 February. The state of emergency will be used to place further restrictions on human rights, and it is for this reason that it is a cause of great concern to us in the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats. By way of example, key places of refuge for Tibetans who have been forced to leave their homeland have been closed, including the Tibetan Refugee Welfare Office. For the past 15 years, this Office has supported the work of the UNHCR refugee centre in Kathmandu, with which I myself am familiar, and at present around 1 000 asylum seekers are living there.
In addition, the Office of the Representative of the Dalai Lama, which was established in 1959, has been closed. The situation is becoming increasingly desperate. Commissioner, I welcome the initiatives taken by the European Union, as well as those taken by India and the USA, one example of these being that the King has been called upon to end the state of emergency within 100 days. A representative of the European Commission who was present at the meeting of our SAARC Delegation this morning said that a number of funding programmes would be suspended, in order to strengthen democracy by means of economic pressure. Fortunately, however, development aid will continue to be granted, and targeted at the poorer sections of the population and local human rights organisations and NGOs.
I would be delighted if the issue of human rights violations in Nepal were to appear on the agenda of the session of the UN Commission on Human Rights to be held in Geneva. Nepalese democracy is only 15 years old; it is still fragile, and must be protected rather than destroyed."@en1
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